Fast Facts

Children

• 10.9 million children under the age of five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths.
• Almost 16,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes – that is one child every five seconds.
• Malaria kills an African child every thirty seconds.
• Some 1.8 million child deaths occur each year as a result of diarrhea.
• Half of the 2.2 billion children in the world live in poverty.
• 121 million children do not receive basic education.

DISEASE

• Pneumonia and other lower respiratory infections are the number one cause of death in the developing world. This is followed by HIV/AIDS, malaria, diarrhea, TB and measles, respectively.
• TB is a frequent killer for people with AIDS. African states suffering from the HIV pandemic have experienced an annual 10 percent rise in TB cases.
• Africa and Southeast Asia account for 82% of cases of measles.
• HIV/AIDS
• It is estimated that 39.5 million people live with HIV globally. Africa is home to 25 million, or 64%, of total HIV infections.
• Everyday in Africa HIV/AIDS kills 6, 600 people and another 8, 500 people are infected.
• 12 million children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.

SANITATION

• Close to half of all people in developing countries suffering at any given time from a health problem that is caused by water and sanitation deficits.
• Diseases and productivity losses linked to water and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa amount to 5% of their GDP, which is more than the region receives in aid.
• Only 29 per cent of those living in rural areas in the least developed countries are served with adequate sanitation.

AGRICULTURE

• In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.
• More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.
• Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.
• For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.

EDUCATION

• There are an estimated 771 million illiterate adults in the world, about two-thirds of whom are women.
• Women in the least developed countries have the lowest literacy rate of any region in the world, with only 44.1 per cent being able to read.
• Only about one in three children will complete primary education in six countries: Niger (21%), Guinea-Bissau (27%), Burkina Faso (27%), Chad (32%), Burundi (32%) and Mali (33%).

WOMEN

• A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.
• Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day — an estimated 529,000 each year-from pregnancy-related causes.
• If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.

DEBT

• Africa owes $227 billion to western creditors – $379 for every man, woman and child in Africa.
• Sub-Saharan Africa receives $10 billion in aid but loses $14 billion in debt payments per year.
• Every day Sub-Saharan Africa spends $30 million dollars repaying debts to the world’s rich countries and international institutions. Often they spend so much on debt payments that they have very little left over for health or education.
• For every $1 the West gives in aid to developing countries, $9 comes back in debt service.
• Africa’s debt burden is twice that of any region in the world – it carries 11% of the developing world’s debt, with only 5% of its income.

POPULATION

• The world population has reached 6.6 billion in 2006, up from 6 billion in 1999, and is heading toward 8 billion by 2025.
• Ninety-nine percent of that growth will be in developing countries.
• Between 2005 and 2015 the Least Developed Countries as a whole are expected to absorb nearly a quarter of all population growth in the world.
• The population of the 50 Least Developed Countries is projected to more than double, passing from 0.8 billion in 2005 to 1.7 billion in 2050.
• During 2005-2050, eight countries are expected to account for half of the world’s projected population increase: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, United States of America, Ethiopia, and China, listed according to the size of their contribution to population growth.

OFFICIAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE

• The total Official Development Assistance (ODA) flow to Least Developed Countries rose by 8.8 per cent to $25.6 billion in 2005. Only seven of the world’s wealthiest countries have met the target as set by the Brussels Program of Action of spending 0.15 to 0.2 per cent of gross national income on aid to the LDCs.

ECONOMIC GROWTH

• Within the least developed countries, the landlocked developing countries are predicted to have a high 7.6 per cent GDP growth rate for 2007.
• The oil and mining industries have increased the predicted GDP growth to over 7 percent in Sudan, Chad, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have a 6.3 per cent GDP growth rate this year due to oil output recovering in Nigeria and new oil fields in Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

BIRTH & LIFE EXPECTANCY

• In the least developed countries, 1 in 17 women have a lifetime risk of maternal death compared to 1 in 4000 in industrialized countries.
• The average life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa has only risen one year since 1970, from 45 to 46, while least developed countries overall have seen an increase of 9 years, from 44 to 53, over the same time period.
• There are 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in the least developed countries.
• Of the 130 million babies born every year, about 4 million die in the first 4 weeks of life — the neonatal period.
• Globally, women give birth to approximately 2.6 children during their lifetime, compared to an average of 4.86 children per mother in the least developed countries.

WATER

• 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion people lack access to decent sanitation.
• One in five people living the developing world lack access to clean water — suggested minimum of 20 liters per day- while average water use in Europe ranges between 200-300 liters per day and 575 liters in the United States.
• Poor people living in slums often pay 5-10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people living in the same city.
• About 700 million people in 43 countries live below the water-stress threshold of 1,700 cubic metres per person per year. In 20 years, 3 billion people will live in countries under that threshold.

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION

• Net deforestation rates have fallen since the 1990-2000 period, but some 13 million hectares of the world’s forests are still lost each year, including 6 million hectares of primary forests. Primary forests — forests with no visible signs of past or present human activities — are considered the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet.
• According to NASA, the polar ice cap is now melting at the rate of 9 percent per decade. Arctic ice thickness has decreased 40 percent since the 1960s.
• More than a quarter of Africa’s population lives within 100km of the coast, and projections suggest that the number of people at risk from coastal flooding will increase from 1 million in 1990 to 70 million in 2080.
• By 2050 rainfall in Africa could decline by 5% and become more variable year by year.

Sources:

• UNICEF: State of the World’s Children 2007. www.unicef.org
• United Nations Population Fund. www.unfpa.org
• United Nations Environmental Program. www.unep.org
• United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). www.un.org/esa
• World Health Organization (WHO). www.who.org
• United Nations Development Programme: Human Development Report Statistics. www.undp.org